When Less is More

Do you create content for an online course, a membership site or even a book?
You may be making one of the biggest mistakes most people do all the time. That is they believe if they create more content, then they will be able to ask for more money. That sort of makes sense. The more content you provide, the more you can charge, right?

The reality is that your potential customers don’t buy products. They buy outcomes. They buy what your product will do for them. Your product or service is a vehicle to take them from where they are now to where they want to be. Your product is simply the vehicle to take them there.

For example, let’s use a product or service that is a real life vehicle.

Imagine you are planning to go on holidays. You wouldn’t start checking out the airlines or buses or trains or cruises before you actually decided where you were going. So the destination of where you want to go for your holiday is the first decision you need to make. Once you know where you want to go, then you look at the options on how to get there. That’s where your product fits in.

Let’s say you decided to have your holiday on a tropical island. You search for airlines that can take you there and you find two that are suitable.

Airline A flies east and takes 10 hours to get to your tropical island resort. Due to the fact that it is a long flight, the airline has to provide the passengers meals and refreshments, extra staff to look after the passengers, plus pay for fuel. So the cost for Airline A to fly to the tropical island is $1000.

The other option is Flight B. Everything is exactly the same as Flight A, except instead of flying east, they fly west, which is a shorter flight. They can get to your tropical island in just 5 hours. That’s half the time!

So you would expect that it would cost Airline B, half as much as Airline A. They wouldn’t need to serve as many meals, they would have less staff, and pay for less fuel. So in theory, if their costs were half as much as Airline A, you might expect they will charge price or $500.

This is the thought process of most online businesses. Create more content for your customers so that you can charge more money. Create less content, and you have to charge less money.

Wrong! Remember, you customers are not buying your product. They are buying the outcome of using your product. So if you can help them to get to where they want quicker, than you can charge more money.

So with the airline example, Airline B, they have half the costs of Airline A, but they could charge twice as much because they can get their passengers to their destination twice as fast.

Does the made sense?

So when you are launching your product online, focus on how effectively you can help your potential customers to get where they want to go rather than focusing on the vehicle that will take them there.

I am using this concept for my book launch. I’ve cut down the number of pages readers will need to get to where they want to go. I will be saving time and therefore I can charge more.

So that is the lesson for this week. I hope you can use that for your product. We’ll be back again next week.